Bioperl: UCSF Discussion, Public V. Private Genome Efforts

[David J. States]

It is important to remember the fundamental distinction between a grant and
a contract; there are no deliverables in a grant.  The funding agencies
award grants because they believe you are a worthy person with a meritorious
idea, but they have no legal expectation for return on this award.  MANY
companies and products have been developed from work that was originally
funded through public grants.  Not only is there nothing wrong with
profitting from the results of government funded research, as a result of
the Bayh Dole Act, institutions accepting government grants are under an
obligation to attempt to commercialize the results of federally funded
research.

There is one significant exception to the rights of investigators to profit
from the results of their research.  The government does retain "march in"
rights to use the results of federally funded research in the course of
other federally funded research projects.  This right has been rarely used,
but there was recently a high level panel reviewing tech transfer that
suggested the NIH should make greater use of this right.  Since PHRED and
PHRAP were developed with federal funding, the NIH has the right to use the
software in other NIH funded projects. 

NCBI is a special case since they are a part of the government.  Government
work is not, in general, subject to copyright so both the software and data
developed at NCBI are freely available.

Having said all of this, the free accessibility of molecular sequence data
is the exception rather than the rule in science.  X-ray crystal structures
for macromolecules have only recently been deposited in PDB without
significant (1 yr) delays, and many other forms of experimental data are
held  by investigators without any expectation that they will be made
public.  Indeed barter based on access is to data is critical in
establishing many collaborations.  And of course, most scientific journals
are copyrighted and virtually all publishers demand transfer of the
copyright from the authors.

Support the Brown & Lipman proposal to establish a free electronic archive
for biomedical literature!!!!

David States

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	BobbyO [SMTP:BobbyO@cgl.ucsf.EDU]
> Sent:	Thursday, January 21, 1999 7:16 PM
>     .... As mentioned, I believe that an effort to leverage
> mass-sequencing firms' obligate dependence on publicly funded,
> academically created tools, could be used to insure both fair use and
> reasnable profit from genomic data. ...
=========== Bioperl Project Mailing List Message Footer =======
Project URL: http://bio.perl.org/
For info about how to (un)subscribe, where messages are archived, etc:
http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/bcd/Perl/Bio/vsns-bcd-perl.html
====================================================================